[The Dining Room] dramatizes the domestic crises that usually afflict families during lunch and dinner. The problem is that neither the crises nor the families are particularly interesting; the play seems more an exercise in WASP sociology than an act of theatrical imagination.

To be fair, the playwright is less interested in dramatic confrontations than in depicting, through a technique of kaleidoscopic time warps, the manners and morals of a dying aristocratic class. The play is full of convincing nostalgia for the passing of a decent old world, and tolerant resignation (less convincing) over what is coming to replace it. "Some Irish fellow or Jewish gentleman will be sitting in that chair—and your grandson will be back at the plough," remarks one crustacean before remembering to add, "and that won't be such a bad thing either." It is the noblesse oblige of Renoir's Grand Illusion, where the aristocratic French officer ends up sacrificing his life for Jewish and working-class comrades, though he feels much more kinship with his noble German counterpart. I was more persuaded by another scene in which a young Amherst student, "studying the eating habits of various vanishing cultures—the WASPs of Northeastern United States," is thrown out of the room by his Aunt Harriet, who threatens to "cut off his anthropological balls."

Much more affectionately, Gurney is also studying the eating habits of vanishing Americans. As played by a cast of eight, who transform (sometimes too cutely) into children, young people, middle-aged people, and oldsters, The Dining Room is a short course in what to do with finger bowls, how to make butter balls, and when to use the Waterford crystal…. The playwright recognizes the futility of mourning dead manners, so his elegy is often tempered with a shrug. The writing is refined, deliberate, and economical; it is also, unfortunately, thin and colorless, as if the maid had substituted water for the ink. (pp. 27-8)